_(Reprinted by kind permission of the author and of the proprietors of
the_ "_Sunday Times.")_
Only in solitude can soliloquies be appreciated, and Mr. Santayana
is not an author for loud streets or for them who tear round the
country in a blatant char-à-banc. He avoids even the high roads, and
we shall come upon him, if we are lucky, in a grassy hollow of the
bank of some dark river, and hear him talking to himself in a voice
which disturbs neither the dragon-flies nor the thrushes. He meditates
by the hour together on the sunlight in the buttercups, which gives
him the illusion of life, or on the hurrying flood of liquid agate,
which reminds him of the illusion of death. Everything is a symbol to
him, and if he has a volume of poetry open at his side he does not
distinguish its verse from the puzzling confidences of the blackbirds,
and the insects are dreams which mingle with his own. The activity of
existence is arrested for him, and time has become a vain expression.
This is his dominant mood, but sometimes he rouses himself and walks
to the wayside inn, where he watches the farmers and the travellers,
unobserved by them. He notes their ways and their talk with a shrewd
and sometimes humorous pertinacity, but they hardly exist for him more
vividly than did the thrushes and the dragon-flies. All are dreams, all
are in a condition of _maia,_ and the more he tries to distinguish them
the more they melt into one. He exists, and he soliloquises, in a mood
of perpetual reverie.
This is an allegory, and in plain terms Mr. Santayana is a cosmopolitan
philosopher of wide reputation. He is the son of a gentleman of Spain,
who emigrated to New York. He tells us that his father learned to read
English, which implies that he never learned to speak it. The son not
only speaks, but writes, our language with an exquisite exactitude and
grace, so that he is one of those rare figures, like Mr. Conrad and
Mme. Mary Duclaux, who, having adopted in mature years a tongue not
theirs by birth, contrive not merely to master but to excel in it.
Mr. Santayana was for many years a professor of philosophy in Harvard
University, where he showed no mercy to Hegel and was a thorn in the
side of the Pragmatists. He is the author of a _Life of Reason,_ in
five volumes, which I know that I shall never read, but which I am sure
it is safe to recommend to persons younger and more thoughtful than
myself. Since he ceased to be a professor, Mr. Santayana has wandered
much in Europe, which, distracted as it is, he prefers to America,
as quieter. The Great War found him at Oxford, waiting for the spark
from heaven and meditating on the importunities of the hour. He stayed
there, listening to the whirr of the aeroplanes over Port Meadow, and
admiring, perhaps not without envy, the gallant ardour of the youths
who started forth so bravely to arrest "the demons of the whirlwind"
in France and Gallipoli. He stayed in England, because, glancing over
the world, he found England pre-eminently the home of decent happiness,
even at that desolating hour.
It is amusing to pick out here and there, and put together in a bunch,
some of this Hispano-American philosopher's impressions of our race,
but we make a mistake if we suppose him largely or generally interested
in any particular nation. What makes him attractive, but also a little
alarming, is his excessive detachment from the modern life in which
he moves so silently and observantly. He is not a social essayist,
like Montaigne or Charles Lamb or Stevenson. He is almost obtrusively
indifferent to whether he has an audience or not. This makes him, in
spite of his extreme attention to moral action, a little inhuman. I do
not think that he mentions the Scholar Gipsy, but he has a great deal
of the spirit which made that hero of Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem
fly the haunts of men. Mr. Santayana will not fly too far; he will see
"the line of festal light in Christ Church Hall," before he turns to the
woods and the wilds. But the essence of him is solitary, and he escapes
from society not that he may forget it, but that, removed from that
element in it which seems to kill the mind, he may reflect upon it with
the minimum of disturbance.
He is anxious to disown the name of metaphysician, but he is a
psychologist to the tips of his fingers, and he is still in hopes
of discovering a scientific philosophy which may explain to him the
apparent discord between man and nature over which he is always
brooding. His temper, excessively disturbed by recent events in the
political and moral history of the world, may be clearly studied in the
very remarkable essay called "War Shrines," and again in "Tipperary,"
one of the most whimsical and most individual. He started life with
a premonition of things noble and tender, and his dreams have often
seemed to betray him. But when he has escaped from the fatiguing
conventions of life, when he can forget the ugly side of society, his
old visions come back to him with smiling eyes, and he can admit that
they have kept half their promise.
We are so well accustomed to attacks, often very petulant and silly,
made against England by Englishmen, that it is quite refreshing to
read the impressions of a Spanish philosopher trained in America, who
has a much higher opinion of us than we are apt to have of ourselves.
Mr. Santayana is prompt to protest that nothing would make him wish to
become an Englishman. His birthright was settled at his birth, and we
feel that there is that kind of patriotism about him which if he had
been born a Mongolian would not allow him to waver in his loyalty to
Mongolia.
But he has been a sort of Ulysses, and the result of his wanderings
is to make him prefer the Englishman to any other human variety. This
is decidedly gratifying, and it will amuse the desultory reader
to skim Mr. Santayana's pages in search of his impressions of our
race. They are not given in dogmatic form, but they are found to be
consistent, and, as I say, they are gratifying in the mouth of so
shrewd and so disinterested an observer. After traversing many lands he
concludes that the English character is the best; it is as strong as
the American, and softer, and less obstreperous. He finds the nearest
parallel to that old Greek temperament, which he adores, in the English
modesty in determination. It seems to rest his spirit to see that we
are self-sufficing. Not that he is blind to our national defects, for
he thinks that an exquisite or subtle Englishman, although such exist,
is a _lusus natures._ It is not our business to be subtle, and when we
are, there is always a tendency in us to become wrong-headed. We turn
affected or else puritanical, and these extremes are highly distasteful
to Mr. Santayana.
"The Englishman travels and conquers without a settled
design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His
adventures are all external; they change him so little that
he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather
in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot
in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all
the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of
Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.
It will be a black day for the human race when scientific
blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to
supplant him."
To give a general idea of Mr. Santayana's essays, I find a difficult
task, because of a certain density and uniformity in his expression.
He avoids the positive in all its forms. Not merely is he careful
not to be dogmatic, but, speaking as he does to and as it were for
himself alone, he is apt to combine an exactitude of language with a
considerable dilution of thought. He is not averse from the pleasant
foible of repeating himself, and as he does this in fresh language
the reader, if he is at all censorious, is apt to resent a little
the revolving flight of the ideas. Mr. Santayana soliloquises like
an aeroplane making graceful curves and daring drops in one section
of the ether. His profound scepticism forbids him to alight, for he
has no faith in the current assumptions of daily life, and but a very
faint interest in facts. He swoops in the light like a swallow, and we
must be content to follow his turns and returns, with sympathy for his
candour and freshness, and gratitude for his gracious skill. But to
define what his object is, though he makes a hundred affirmations of
it, is not altogether easy.